As traffic crawls along the northbound lanes of China Lake Boulevard, construction crews are continuing to hammer along on the Digital 395 Middle Mile Project.

Mike Ort, CEO of Praxis, confirmed Monday that the construction crews were installing fiber optic cables up China Lake Boulevard, after finishing up all of its conduit work.

“We’ve got most of our conduit in for our anchor sites and we have our node building completed,” Praxis said.

The node building Ort referred to was a prefabricated building designed as a recharge site for digital signals coming up and down the 583-mile network from Barstow to Carson City and Reno.

Ort said the Digital 395 project also had most of its main cable in between Barstow and Ridgecrest, but had some work happening in Boron and plans waiting in Barstow.

“We’re still waiting for permits for our node building in Barstow,” Ort said.

Overall, Ort said Praxis has 150 miles of cable already installed.

With $100 million budget provided by the Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 and the California Public Utilities Commission’s California Advanced Services Fund, Praxis has until July 31 to connect the entire project.

“This has been an aggressive schedule,” Ort said. “The goal is to get most of the construction done.”

However, there are some delays in the process, especially wrapping up last-minute permits.

“We’re still waiting on some environmental permits,” Ort said.

Digital 395 is a bold plan to connect Eastern Sierra Nevada communities with a vastly upgraded network system – an area for the most part vastly underserved. The project will connect all public facilities and first responder agencies like schools, hospitals and government buildings.

In addition, private network or “last-mile” providers have the opportunity to tap into the cable network and provide services for private consumers.

The entire network is made up of a 432-strand optic fiber cable network, though Ort said the project would only fire up four strands once the project is fully operational – two in each direction at a 150-gigabit capacity.

“I’m estimating that would probably bring 100 times the capacity more than is in the valley right now,” Ort said.